THE SILICON VALLEY 100: The Coolest People In Tech Right Now

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By Megan Rose Dickey

The Daily Telegram - Adrian, MI

By Megan Rose Dickey

Posted Mar. 7, 2014 at 10:02 AM

By Megan Rose Dickey
Posted Mar. 7, 2014 at 10:02 AM

After months of research, debate, and more research, Business Insider is proud to present our annual Silicon Valley 100, the authoritative ranking of the people who matter most in Silicon Valley. The list covers people who backed promising companies and saw big exits; were star executives; created new, interesting things; changed entire industries; and made industry-defining acquisitions or took their companies public.

In sum, these people aren't riding on old reputations. All of them did something of note since our last installment in February 2013, and they won big. And if you feel that we missed someone, tell us — we're not all-knowing, and we love telling stories about amazing people.

We got word earlier this year that producers Mike Judge and Alec Berg will be launching an Entourage-esque comedy show called "Silicon Valley" on HBO that will poke fun at SV and help pop its arrogance bubble.

The show follows a group of close-knit friends working at a company trying to develop a new search algorithm, and will include cameos from real-life Silicon Valley figures. It airs April 6 on HBO.

Page 2 of 19 - Aarthi Ramamurthy is one of the most notable female entrepreneurs out there today. She spent six years at Microsoft working on its popular Visual Studio software development tool and on Xbox Live.

Before founding Y Combinator-backed Lumoid, a startup for letting people test-drive electronics before buying them, she co-founded a bra-fitting company called True&Co.

A team of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying to cure HIV/AIDS. Immunity Project, which is in the current Y Combinator class, has already developed a prototype and completed preliminary lab testing.

The Immunity Project is currently trying to raise $482,000 to fund its final experiment before beginning its Phase I clinical study. So far, more than 1,000 people have pledged over $200,000 to the project.

As an education tech founder, it's not always easy to get schools and institutions on board, mostly due to a bunch of bureaucracy. That's why Pathbrite founder Heather Hiles is so impressive. Last year, Pathbrite raised an additional $4 million led by testing behemoth ACT, with participation from Rethink Education for its e-portfolio product for students. Pathbrite has raised $8 million in total to date.

As of March 2013, Pathbrite was in more than 100 universities and school districts. Stanford, for example, purchased 1,000 licenses for students in its design, education, and engineering schools. And as of September 2013, more than 400 schools have used Pathbrite's new learning platform.

Page 3 of 19 - After being told he had the worst startup in his Y Combinator batch, Taro Fukuyama had to figure out how to turn the company around. Six pivots later, he landed on AnyPerk. AnyPerk helps put startups on par with Google and Facebook when it comes to perks, offering discounts on things like movie tickets, lift tickets, cell phone plans, Lyft car-sharing rides, and car rentals.

This year, Watsi became the first charitable company to raise over $1 million in funding from traditional angel investors in Silicon Valley.

It is also the first Y-Combinator company to nab investor Paul Graham for its board of directors. Watsi allows anyone to give as little as $5 to fund someone's medical care, and 100% of the money is donated. The mission of this startup is so beautiful, you just have to root for its success.

Erin Teague worked as the growth product manager for the mobile-only social network Path for two years and is responsible for the company's astounding user growth in 2013. In the spring, the app was growing by 1 million new users per week. It hit the 10-million-user mark in April. She worked on the product team at Twitter for two years before joining the Path team.

Last fall, she joined Yahoo with a director of product management role.

Ramona Pierson has survived worse things than most people can imagine. In 1984, Pierson got hit by a drunk driver and fell into an 18-month coma. After recovering, Pierson eventually launched her first startup, SynapticMash, an education software company that sold to Promethean World for $10 million in 2010.

Now, Pierson is running social learning startup Declara. The aim is to help people sift through tons of content when they're not exactly sure what they're looking for. Last September, Declara raised a $5 million seed round from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, and Data Collective.

Charles Hudson is a well-known face in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem because he has his hands in both sides of the business, both as a founder at Bionic Panda Games and now an investor at SoftTech Ventures.

Previously, Hudson founded Social Gaming Summit, one of the leading conferences in the free-to-play games space. He was also the VP of Business Development for Serious Business, a company that Zynga later acquired in 2010.

HandUp is proof that the tech industry does care about the homeless. Rose Broome and Zac Witte launched their crowdfunding platform for the homeless back in August.

In its pilot stage, there are about 100 homeless people who receive cash donations via text or email. Within the last couple of months, the pair landed a seed investment from serial entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis. To date, HandUp has raised $200,000.

When Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing the NSA is allegedly tapping Google's servers and private networks, David Drummond, the company's chief legal officer, expressed his outrage and urged the need for dramatic reform in government intelligence policy.

In the wake of Snowden's many revelations, major tech companies have been put under a microscope, and Google has taken the lead in being as transparent as possible about government requests for user info.

Getting the public to regain trust in the Web and and major tech companies like Google isn't an easy task, but Drummond is tackling it valiantly, insisting that trust is to encourage innovation.

In four months, PayPal founder Max Levchin helped 1,000 women get pregnant thanks to his new fertility app Glow. Glow uses data to analyze the best time for a woman to get pregnant.

Page 6 of 19 - In August, Levchin landed a $6 million Series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. Just last month, Glow launched its service for enterprise. The first two companies to partner with Glow are hot startups Eventbrite and Evernote.

LinkedIn continues to surpass Wall Street expectations with user growth, revenues, and profits. Jeff Weiner, who joined the company when it was struggling in the shadow of Facebook, deserves credit for spurring innovation and disciplined execution.

LinkedIn's market value has passed $23 billion and it currently employs over 5,000 people. Worldwide, LinkedIn has over 277 million members.

David Lawee moved away from his position as head of mergers and acquisitions at Google to lead a stealthy late-stage investment fund called Google Capital earlier last year. Just last month, Google Capital officially launched to invest in growth-stage companies.

Srinivasan had previously co-founded genetic testing company Counsyl. As of December 2013, the company was testing somewhere around 3 to 4% of all births in the U.S. Given that it charges around $500 to $600 per test, the company is on an annual revenue run-rate of about $60 million to $80 million per year.

Photo app Frontback caught fire last year, amassing 200,000 downloads in just one month. The app has users take two pictures (one of what they're seeing in front of them, and the other with their phone's front-facing camera) and it stitches them together.

In October, Frontback reportedly turned down an acquisition offer from Twitter and instead raised $3 million.

Secret is the latest social app to go viral, and it's filled with a boatload of Silicon Valley insights and rumors.

The app, which launched last month, was founded by ex-Googlers David Mark Byttow and Chrys Bader.

The idea behind Secret is to let you share anonymously with your friends. It's kind of like secret-sharing app Whisper, but the difference is that all of the secrets are from your friends, or a friend of a friend.

More than a year later, we can see the effect that funding had on the company. GitHub doubled the number of projects that it was hosting in 2013, and is now home to about 10 million software projects.

Although GitHub doesn't publically disclose revenue, co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner has put it in the ballpark of "millions and millions a year," largely thanks to its enterprise clients who pay to keep their GitHub code out of public view. That's a huge success because when GitHub raised the funding, the company said it wanted to use the money to break into enterprise.

Chris Cox is one of the Facebook employees Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg trusts the most. Cox first joined Facebook as an engineer in 2005 and helped build the News Feed.

Now, Cox is in charge of News Feed and all of the advertising people at Facebook report to him. In December 2013, Facebook made some changes to its News Feed in an attempt to better distinguish between high-quality and low-quality content.

Simon Khalaf is gearing up to take his mobile analytics company public as Flurry continues to grow into a massive business.

In September, Khalaf told Business Insider that an IPO is inevitable for Flurry. At that time, Flurry had a net-revenue run-rate of about $100 million. To date, Flurry has taken $50.5 million in funding from investors.

Former Wall Street Journal tech reporter and editor Jessica Lessin officially launched her own tech news site in December called The Information. To read all of its articles, you have to shell out $399 a year or $39 a month.

James Beshara's startup Crowdtilt is solving a pretty common problem: group payments, which makes it possible to divvy up a bill between friends. Last year alone, Crowdtilt raised $35 million.

Page 12 of 19 - In December of last year, investors rewarded the company with $23 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. In March 2013, Crowdtilt raised a $12 million Series A round, also led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The Internet of Things is all the rage lately, so it's no wonder startup August was able to snag $8 million for its smart locks from Maveron Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Industry Ventures, Rho Ventures, and SoftTech VC.

With August, you'll never have to worry about getting locked out of your house because the system is entirely keyless. August also gives you total control of who can enter your home and when. August will start shipping its locks later this year.

Remember that time Beyoncé announced her new album out of the blue on Instagram?

Well, that's all thanks to Dan Rose, Facebook's head of corporate development and partnerships. Rose and his team had been in talks with Beyoncé for months, and reportedly leaped at the opportunity to announce the album on Instagram, a Facebook-owned photo-sharing app.

Makinde Adeagbo is something of an engineering superstar, bouncing between major tech companies. He spent 3.5 years at Facebook, and became one of the go-to engineers to improve the site speed and overall performance.

Page 14 of 19 - Next, he got snapped up by Dropbox, where he helped improve sharing on the Dropbox platform with things like Dropbox Links, which lets anyone share and preview any file in someone's Dropbox from the Web. In July 2013, he left the huge cloud storage company to become Pinterest's engineering manager.

Within the last year, Conway has tackled issues like gun violence and homelessness in San Francisco.

Just recently, Conway and others in Silicon Valley launched the first of four $1 million challenges aimed at innovating in the gun control space. The goal is to use technology to make guns safer, thereby reducing the number of deaths due to gun violence. Last year, Conway backed startups like Watsi and Medium.

Despite the FDA's cease-and-desist, Wojcicki stands behind the data 23andMe gives its customers. She wrote in November she remains committed to working with the FDA to ensure 23andMe is a trusted consumer product. She also admitted that the company had fallen behind schedule in responding to FDA feedback.

23andMe has raised $188 million to date from investors including Mohr Davidow Ventures, Sergey Brin, Google Ventures, and Genentech.

Going to the doctor shouldn't have to be a pain. That's why One Medical Group makes it dead simple to set up same-day appointments with top-notch doctors. For $199 a year, you can make appointments online, chat with your doctor via email, and avoid hanging out in waiting rooms.

When Google shut down its beloved Reader product, a lot of people flocked to Feedly. A month after Reader disappeared, Feedly emerged as the top RSS traffic referrer.

In August, Feedly kicked off a paid version of its RSS service, adding custom sharing, power search, a speed boost, integration with other apps, and more. It limited the release to 5,000 people, and it only took eight hours for 5,000 $99 lifetime-subscriptions to get snatched up. Around that same time, Feedly was touting more than 13 million users.

Andreessen Horowitz — the venture capital firm with investments in hot companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, GitHub, Twitter, Foursquare, Lyft, and Fab — announced this year that it's raising $1.5 billion for its fourth fund.

Then, in February 2014, Apple appointed Denise Young Smith to lead its worldwide human resources division. The pair are in charge of the future of two of Apple's most important assets: its chain of stores and its talent.

(It's also great to see Apple shaking up its previously male-dominated top ranks.)

Hunter Walk and Satya Patel were able to raise $35 million in a matter of months to invest in early-stage startups through their new VC firm, Homebrew. Since launching in July, Homebrew has backed startups like Plaid.io, Shyp, theSkimm, and UpCounsel.

Page 18 of 19 - Walk and Patel are two former Google employees who have tons of connections in Silicon Valley. Both Patel and Walk joined Google in 2003. Walk stayed until 2013, while Patel did stints at Battery Ventures and Twitter.

In March 2013, Andy Rubin stepped down from his position as the head of Google's Android mobile operating system to "start a new chapter" at the company. We didn't know what that chapter would be until December, when Google announced that he would be in charge of the company's new robotics division.